Presenting without slides: run your talk straight from a whiteboard
You don't need to export your thinking into a deck. How frame-based presenting works in SketchMind — reveal steps, live sync, and a document to send afterwards.
- Presentation mode steps through the frames on your board — there is nothing to export and no second artifact to maintain.
- Reveal steps stage content within a frame, so diagrams build up as you talk.
- The talk is always in sync with the canvas: last-minute edits are automatically in the presentation.
- Write document turns your frames into a formatted, sendable document with PDF download and a view-only share link.
- Presenting, creating and editing are never metered on any plan.
Most presentations die twice. Once when the thinking gets flattened into slides, and again when someone asks a question the deck didn't anticipate. The usual workflow — think somewhere, then export the thinking into a slide tool — is where both problems start. SketchMind takes a different route: the board is the presentation. Here is how to run a talk straight from the canvas, without ever exporting anything.
The export problem
An exported deck is a snapshot. The moment you fix a number on the whiteboard, the deck is stale; the moment someone asks to see the bigger picture behind slide 7, you're toggling apps. Keeping two artifacts in sync — the thinking and the telling — is busywork that adds nothing to either. The fix is not a better export. It's not exporting.
Frames are your slides
In SketchMind, a presentation is built from frames on the canvas. Presentation mode steps through them frame by frame, in order, in a clean view — the audience sees one frame at a time, you see your board become a talk. If you started the board with the AI Explainer's presentation type, this structure comes for free: the AI writes an outline first, decides how many frames the story needs, and the frames appear with titles and fill in one by one. Everything it generates is normal canvas content, so you can rearrange, edit, or Rewrite a single frame that misses the tone — the rest stays put.
Reveal steps: pacing inside a frame
A frame doesn't have to appear all at once. Reveal steps let you stage the content within a frame, so a diagram builds up piece by piece as you talk instead of landing as one wall of information. That's the honest replacement for slide animations: not decoration, but control over what the audience is looking at while you make each point.
Last-minute changes are already in the talk
Because presentation mode runs on the board itself, it is always in sync with the canvas. Fix a typo two minutes before you start, reorder a section during lunch — there is no re-export, no "final_v3.pdf", no risk of presenting the stale version. What you present is, by construction, the current state of your thinking.
After the talk: send a document, not a deck
The awkward moment after a good talk is "can you send that over?" — because a deck without a speaker is half a document. SketchMind's answer is Write document: it reads your frames in presentation order and writes an actual document — an intro, a section per part of the board, key takeaways — laid out as formatted A4 pages, with your frame titles becoming the document structure. You can download it as a PDF or share it as a view-only link. Documents live in your workspace under Final documents, and if you change the board afterwards, the document gets a "Source board changed" marker with a Regenerate button — the new version replaces the old, so there's exactly one current leave-behind. Re-reading or re-downloading an existing document never costs a new export.
What this costs
Here's the part worth knowing before you commit a real talk to it: presenting is never metered, on any plan — neither is creating or editing. The metered things are AI actions: board generations, frame rewrites, and document exports (Pro includes 3 document exports a month; Pro Creator is unlimited). So you can rehearse, revise and present as much as you like. Plans are on the pricing page, and you can try the whole flow today at app.sketchmind.app — free, no credit card. If there's something you'd want presentation mode to do that it doesn't yet, tell us via contact or check what's coming on the roadmap.
Do I have to export anything before presenting?
No. Presentation mode runs directly on the board, frame by frame, and always shows the current state of the canvas.
Can I control what appears when?
Yes — reveal steps stage the content within a frame, so you decide what the audience sees at each point.
What do I send people afterwards?
Use Write document: it turns your frames into a real document you can download as a PDF or share as a view-only link.
What if I change the board after generating the document?
The document is marked "Source board changed" and you can hit Regenerate — the new version replaces the old one.
